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Tuesday, September 30, 2014

This is out of my scrapbook from the 2010 trip my wife and I took to Thailand and Cambodia. We spend 3 days at an elephant camp in the north of Thailand near Chiang Mai, where we helped take care of the elephants. We went with the mahouts in the morning to get the elephants from the forest, brushed off their dusty backs, climbed clumsily onto their necks and rode them off to their bathing hole. We were with our elephants the whole day. We bathed them, fed them, paraded them and played with them. They were extremely gentle - not once were we scared of being trampled by their enormous size. Their giant feet stepped softly through the forest, one foot very carefully in front of the other, hardly making any sound. In fact, that's why in Thailand it's a complement to tell a woman, "You walk like an elephant." Not a recommended pick up line anywhere else though!

Here are some more pick up lines that may (or may not!) help you on your travels:

Sunday, September 7, 2014

When we moved to Mechelen two years ago, one of the first things I noticed was a thriving street art scene. Not the stuff we were used to in Brussels – graffiti, posters, stickers, stencils – there’s hardly any of that in Mechelen. What I found instead was lots of yarn. It was everywhere, yards and yards of it in colorful patterns and cheeky scenes stitched around trees, lampposts, bike racks, bridges, railings…